


Not That Douchebag

by alexthegirl



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Compliant, Headcanon, Marvel Universe, Minor Character(s), One Shot, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 16:16:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5423651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexthegirl/pseuds/alexthegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iron Man 1, told from the point of view of the first person Tony Stark actually saved. Dialogue taken directly from the movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not That Douchebag

“Mark your position and return to base.” The major’s voice came in garbled through the headset, but the pilot didn’t need to hear the order twice. He had been waiting for those words all day.

“Roger that, Ballroom,” he confirmed. He was going back to base and getting into his bunk and staying there until his body returned to a level of function that didn’t leave every sense stuck on overload. Chasing one object that didn’t show up on radar and disappeared as quickly as it appeared was enough for the pilot, and he wanted to get out of the sky as quickly as possible so that someone else could deal with the next one. With his heart still beating in his ears, the pilot twisted the joystick and showed the horizon his plane’s underside. As he looked out the jet’s canopy at the sunlit clouds spread out underneath the blindingly blue sky and his partner’s plane roaring alongside him, the sound of his heart suddenly threatened to deafen him. Never mind about the bunk then. 

“On your belly!” he shouted at his partner. “It looks like a-” He paused, not believing what the object currently stuck to the bottom of his partner’s jet looked like, “man!” Panic set in. “Shake him off! Roll! Roll!” 

His partner shot away from the pilot until the two planes were in line with each other, tearing across the cloudscape. The pilot could only stare, dumbfounded, at the red and gold figure plastered to the bottom of the plane, arms out and feet back as though it was flying the plane on its back. His partner started to spin, and the pilot watched the thing rock back and forth as it spun, its legs flopping on the plane’s surface, until finally it released its grip and streaked towards—

The pilot’s seat rocked violently and tilted him away from the glaring sun as he watched half of his plane’s left wing spiral below him, falling towards and then through the clouds.

“I’m hit! I’m hit!” The pilot shouted rather obviously as he watched the sun whiz past his view again and again, as though he was watching the earth turn and days go by in seconds. He heard a voice speaking in his helmet, but he couldn’t understand it through the roar of the engine and the wails and flashing lights of his control panel, the sun turning the earth and time, the tanned ground getting closer every time he faced it, and all the while his own stupid heart that wouldn’t shut up. 

“...has been hit. Punch out! Punch out!”

The pilot, who could always follow orders even if he couldn’t avoid red metal men who rode underneath fighter jets, grabbed the lever between his legs and pulled hard. The canopy flew off the plane to follow the spiraling wing in its path towards the ground. The alarm sounds of the plane were replaced by the rush of the atmosphere going by and the screeching of his partner’s plane as it circled back above him. His lungs seemed to be eternally empty, no matter how many gulps of air he took. The sun had stopped spinning around him, but time had not stopped. The ground galloped toward him, and he was reminded of the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King. His mom had asked to watch it with him for one last time, but he didn’t listen. Until the army he had never listened. 

“Whiplash One down.” The pilot vaguely recognized the codename as his own, the voice as his partner’s. He decided it wasn’t important. What was, he remembered then, was falling at terminal velocity towards a very solid surface. He reached for the parachute release at his side and yanked it. 

And yanked it. 

And yanked it. 

Nothing happened except the ground continued to rush toward him and the sun watched unhelpfully and the atmosphere sucked the air out of his lungs even though he was wearing an oxygen mask and his heart tried to keep up with its own beat, but nothing happened.

“Whiplash Two, do you see a chute?”

“Negative, no chute, no chute!”

The sound of his partner’s voice brought the pilot’s own back to himself. “My chute’s jammed,” he sputtered out, again rather obviously. He cursed the chute and the chute maker and the plane and the plane maker, and all the while his chute stubbornly remained in its case, as if it too was afraid of the oncoming stampede of earth. Then his partner’s voice came into his ear again.

“Sir, I’ve got a visual on the bogey.” 

“Whiplash Two, reengage. If you get a clear shot, you take it.”

The pilot wanted to let the major know that his partner should probably come pick him up first before shooting the thing (man? robot?) out of the sky, but he didn’t have the air or the mental capacity to form such a long sentence. He couldn’t get his chute out and a robot broke his fighter jet but he couldn’t stop thinking about the last time he didn’t watch The Lion King with his mom. He was disappointed with himself that he couldn’t think of any bigger life regrets. Why didn’t he just sit down with her and watch it instead of being such an ass? 

He noticed the desert below him again, which noticed him back and said, Doesn’t really matter how many times you didn’t watch a movie with your mom, because guess what? You’re about to die! 

“That thing just took out an F-22 inside a legal no fly zone. Whiplash Two, if you have a clear shot, take it!” The pilot tried again to confirm his approval of the major’s plan at a potentially later time, but the ground was now too close for him to make any sound that wasn’t going to end up as a sob or a scream. The pilot faced the oncoming earth with both arms out and thought it was fitting he should die doing a belly flop. He had been ungainly and awkward in life, why not also in death? He thought about whether he should close his eyes or not, but it was far more work to keep them open, so a dark death it would be. It was not ideal, but nothing about this situation was. He wished he had thought to take a picture of the robot man before telling his partner to shake it off, because it was the weirdest thing he had even seen. But then remembered he really would not have had time to send it to anyone. 

The pilot’s seat suddenly rocked again, and for a second he thought he had been hit by something again. He wanted to cry; he was doomed to never reach the ground but be buffeted around in the sky for all eternity. He turned his head up, eager for a chance to at least look at the sun instead of the ground while falling forever, but he didn’t see the sun. He saw a face. It was a golden face, and its eyes glowed a white-blue. It had no discernible nose, and had only a thin slit for a mouth, but it looked vaguely human. 

Before the pilot’s brain was racing faster than the ground; now it went utterly silent. A golden glowing face did not belong where the sun should have been. But here it was, and connected to a red and golden body with hands that glowed the same white-blue light. He noticed the contrail left by the golden object that streaked across the sky, then dipped at an impossible angle, like whatever it was had followed him as he fell to earth. So unless angels made contrails, and the pilot wasn’t hallucinating, the face was a real face that belonged to a real...something. 

The pilot tried to remember which words would ask the thing whether it was the red and golden metal man that broke his fighter jet or just its twin brother. As he thought of the possibility of two red metal men flying around above Afghanistan breaking fighter jets, the glowing hand grabbed the chute lever and ripped the casing off entirely. The pilot’s body protested against the sudden whiplash as fabric ballooned up over his head with a soft flapping sound and the ground slowed itself from a sprint to a leisurely jog toward the pilot. Air rushed into his lungs although the amount of air in his mask had not changed. He looked down as the thing looked up at him with white eyes. Without any acknowledgement of the pilot, it turned its head and shot away into the clouds until it was gone.

“Good chute! Good chute!” 

His partner’s voice and the cheers from HQ echoed through his helmet, but it was like an echo that came from the far side of a canyon. There were only those glowing eyes and glowing hands, and that for a second as the not-angel and the pilot had plummeted to earth, he could have sworn he heard it breathing.

 

One Week Later

“Hey. Hey. HEY.”

The pilot grunted, but the rib poking accompanied by an increasingly loud “HEY!” did not stop. He rolled over on this bunk towards the source of the annoyance. When he opened his eyes, another pair of eyes stared back at him. This was one of the reasons he hated the top bunk; people were always at eye level. 

“What the fuck do you want?” he grumbled, refusing to lift his head off the pillow. 

The woman whose eyes still stared right into his smiled innocently. “You got a package, which wouldn’t normally make me wake you up, although you know I love doing that because I love you. But this one says ‘Read Now’ right on the top. So, like, how was I supposed to wait until you woke up to give it to you? That seems silly and, frankly, against the clearly written instructions, so my only course of action was to-”

“Please stop,” the pilot groaned louder. “Just give it to me and go far away.”

“Love ya bud,” the woman smiled even more broadly, spun on her toes, and walked briskly away. Once she was out of earshot, the pilot responded with a bitter but sincere “love you too but like please don’t ever do that again I swear to god.”

He stared at the package that lay on his bed next to his thigh. It was flatter than Travis’s usual gifts but the “Read Now” scrawled on the cardboard box was definitely Travis’s writing. The pilot rolled onto his back, scooted himself up to sitting, and took the package in his hands. It was terribly taped in typical Travis fashion, so the pilot had no problem ripping it open and letting the contents fall into his lap. The contents, it turned out, were a newspaper folded into a neat square, with a Post-it note stuck on top that said, “Look familiar?” 

“Wow Trav, you started reading the newspaper, what a big boy,” the pilot muttered, smiling to himself as he unfolded the pages. When he finally flattened out the front page, his smile disappeared and was replaced by a gape. There was a grainy picture through a barbed wire fence of a red and gold man walking down the highway, under a title that read “WHO IS THE IRON MAN?” The picture didn’t capture the glowing eyes or the glowing hands but it was undeniably Not-Angel Robot Man. 

“You,” the pilot breathed out. He couldn’t move. He just stared at the photo. 

Robot Man was real. 

The thing that had saved the pilot’s life the week before was real.

The pilot obviously knew that Robot Man (or Iron Man as the paper said, but it didn’t sound right to him) had always been real. There was a wreck in the middle of the Afghani desert to prove it. But this was different. His partner and his CO and the major and Travis had believed him when he had told them what he had seen, but here was the picture he had been waiting for to prove it. Robot Man was real, and apparently walking around Los Angeles. Then the pilot noticed another Post-it sticking out of the bottom of the page: “Flip for more.” The pilot didn’t know if he could take any more news, but the fact that his metal savior was on the front page of the LA Chronicle was enough to get him to obey the note. He saw another front page from the next day’s news, according to the date in the top right corner. This time there was a photograph of a man’s goateed face staring out behind the camera and the caption “I AM IRON MAN” written underneath his face. 

“What the fuck?” the pilot said for the second time this morning. He brought the paper closer to his face, gazing at his angel not-angel, his mysterious metal man, the most amazing thing that ever happened to him. Then he paused.

“Aw man, are you shitting me? Not that douchebag!”


End file.
